I wanted you all to know that the outage we have experienced the past 36 horus wasn't the result of something horrible with the server. My ISP switched the IP address of the site in an attempt to do some load balancing on their network equipment.

Unfortunately, they didn't change the DNS entry for another 24 hours. So the site was up but you didn't know how to get here.

For those who care, DNS is the magic that maps host names to the numeric IP addresses that machines on the Internet actually are identified by. When the mapping is incorrect, you don't go anywhere.

So we didn't have a hardware failure. But we did get close to a stroke dealing with technical support.

If you ever see an outage and suspect something isn't right, feel free to contact myself or Michele via private email. Don't use a PM because if The Board is down for you, it is often down for us for all practical purposes.

We will be leaving for Munich on 16 March and returning on 24 March. I will try to do some tests this weekend to make sure the server reboots automatically after a power outage.